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KyleGoetz (Offline)
Attorney at Flaw
 
Posts: 2,965
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Texas
01-18-2011, 02:04 PM

Quote:
Originally Posted by YuriTokoro View Post
I’m afraid; I don’t see what “sort of detached” means.
By "detached" I mean something like scientific, factual, unemotional, scholarly, objective, cold. And this is generally what someone means when they talk about "detached" mood of a speaking style.

For example, a sociologist describing the results of an experiment will write an article. In the article, often "detached" language is used. In English, this is often technical writing. Another aspect is that in detached writing you use the passive a lot more ("the result was calculated" instead of "I calculated the result") and you don't use first-person pronouns (I, we, us, me, my, our).

So, in a normal conversation I might say "I calculated the result." In detached, scientific writing, you might say "The result was..." or "The result was calculated" or "The researcher calculated the results."
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